Burning Wheel

Burning Wheel is the game that story- or character-oriented gamers brought up on Dungeons and Dragons always wanted. Burning Wheel is a fantasy game with many of the typical tropes (humans with sorcery and faith, elves with spell-songs, greedy dwarves, hateful orcs), but with an underlying system as adept at handling arguing law before a lord as it as at managing battle with a marauding band of horse thieves.

Character creation is a drawn-out but rewarding process involving mapping out your character's history in broad strokes called Lifepaths. Each Lifepath affects what abilities your character possesses and what Lifepaths are available at the next step, leading to characters with coherent stories at the beginning of play. Lifepaths are the closest thing the game has to classes, but each individual Lifepath has less say in how your character develops. Since character creation is based on mapping out a character's past, Burning Wheel characters may come into play with more interesting stories then characters in other games accumulate in the entire time they are played.

Lifepaths are only used in character creation, with development during play depending on how an ability is used. A simple record-keeping system is used to track each time a certain skill is rolled, and the skill rank may increase based on the number of attempts. The better a character is at a skill, the harder it is to advance, requiring more daring use of the skill on the player's part.

In addition to a somewhat brutal combat system, the game features a "Duel of Wits" system for resolving debates and arguments by the characters. Both the Duel of Wits system and the normal combat system rely on the players planning out moves a few at a time, so each side has to choose actions without knowing what their opponent will be doing. Combat tends towards a kind of chaos, where planned actions fall apart in the heat of battle. With each side planning out actions that their opponents don't know about, the combat feels more like Saving Private Ryan then 300, with each combatant scrambling to make the best of an unpredictable situation.

The heart of the system is Artha, a point-based system that rewards players for acting out beliefs listed on their character sheets in ways that enhance the game. Artha is the only way to gain the most powerful type of advancement in the game, the Epiphany, and also provides many smaller bonuses during play, depending on the types of Artha awarded. The genius of Burning Wheel is that roleplaying rewards are tightly integrated with the rest of the system, leading to a rules-heavy game that still demands roleplaying. To succeed in combat, duels of wits, or any other type of roll, a player needs to accumulate Artha, which only comes through acting according to the beliefs created for the character. This leads to a game where playing a character in fun and interesting ways is not just rewarding in its own right, it's also the best strategy for success.

While a great game in and of itself, Burning Wheel has a particularly strong place as a type of bridge between Dungeons and Dragons and story games such as My Life With Master. The rules are deep and somewhat challenging, but they are all designed to produce interesting characters and entertaining plots. The books are even worth reading entirely for the thought put into them by Luke Crane, as several types of author's comments are spread throughout the books.

The basic Burning Wheel game consists of the Burning Wheel Fantasy Roleplaying System and the Character Burner, used for creating characters. Several additional setting books have been produced in limited runs and most are still available, including The Blossoms Are Falling for feudal Japan and Burning Sands: Jihad based on the style of Dune. There are also additional rules for monsters in The Monster Burner, and The Magic Burner is expected to be released for Gen Con. The Burning Wheel system is the basis for the Burning Empires RPG based on the Iron Empire graphic novels of Christopher Moeller, and an RPG based on the Mouse Guard graphic novels has been announced using the Burning Wheel system.